FIFA have confirmed that a ‘routine’ investigation into Bahrain’s convenient tonking over Indonesia side last night, after rumblings of match-fixing and jiggery-pokey began to surface.

Going into the match, Bahrain needed to peg back a nine-goal deficit on World Cup qualifying group leaders to have any chance of making it through to the next phase. Bahrain went on to hit ten unanswered goals past a weakened Indonesia side, who were also reduced to ten men after two minutes when their goalkeeper was sent off.

“Our security will conduct a routine examination of this game and its result given the unusual outcome against results expectation and head-to-head history – and in the interests of maintaining unequivocal confidence in our game.”

Basically, if there’s any jiggery-pokery going on, FIFA want a slice.

Bahrain (who are coached by former England manager Peter Taylor) also needed Qatar to lose their final match against Iran, but they squeaked an 83rd-minute equaliser to draw 2-2 and advance through to the next stage of the Asian qualifying tournament, while Bahrain were dumped out regardless of their scoreline.

2Comments

Uh, sure we lost because it was a fixed match…
*whistles and walks away before anyone notices*

It also didn’t help that the majority of GOOD Indonesian players were playing in a league called ISL (Indonesian Super League, with a structured league system that has existed since 2008 taking from the previous Indonesian first div.) which was unauthorized this year but kept on going anyways. Now only players from the new league IPL (Indonesian Premier League, which doesn’t have a second tier) can join the Indonesian National Team. Our FA is too busy fighting amongst themselves about this whole conundrum so they just let the two leagues go on.